Brain Jack

by Brian Falkner

  Sam glanced back at the mountains on the far side of the lost city. A rising plume of dust caught his eye in the center of the city.

  “That’s one of their vans,” he said, “moving through the—”

  Dodge cut him off. “If we can see their dust cloud, then they can see ours.”

  He floored the gas pedal and the pickup surged forward.

  The vans picked them up just on the outskirts of Henderson. Sam could see two vans screaming along the freeway as they raced to beat the pickup to the interchange with South Boulder Highway and cut them off at the pass.

  They narrowly made it through, swinging through the interchange on protesting tires and veering around onto Route 93 just a hundred yards in front of the vans.

  “Take my gun,” Tyler said, retrieving it from the glove compartment. Tyler held the gun through the gap in the front seats. Sam looked at it blankly.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I wouldn’t know which end was which. Pass me the laptop!”

  It was on the floor in the front of the cab, by Tyler’s feet. He passed it to Sam.

  “What are you doing?” Dodge asked.

  “Government vehicles,” Sam said. “They’ll be LoJacked. If I can hack into the satellite system, I might be able to shut them down.”

  “Go for it,” Dodge said with a tight grin.

  “Damn. No cellular signal,” Sam said after a moment of trying to connect.

  “Keep your eye on it,” Dodge said. “We should pick up something as we approach Boulder City.”

  “I’ll need their license plates,” Sam said.

  “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Tyler said as they flew across an overpass and found themselves suddenly surrounded by tussock and scrub.

  One moment they had been amongst the built-up houses of a Las Vegas suburb; the next it was gone, and the desert enveloped them.

  The fence was in front of them before they realized it, blocking the road, stretching as far as they could see to either side. The end of the contamination zone. There was no way to go around it, no time to avoid it.

  “Hang on!” Dodge yelled, and powered the pickup toward the center of two gates, locked with a chain.

  The pickup hit the gates dead center with a terrible grinding crunch. The heavy chain in the center held, but the hinges on either side gave way. The pickup carried both gates forward for a few yards before they flipped over the top and crashed to the ground behind the truck.

  There was a screech of brakes as one edge of the gates dug into the highway and the other edge reached out for the windshield of the leading van behind them.

  The van hit the gate with a loud crack that starred but did not break its windshield. The following van also slammed on its brakes to avoid a collision, and the gap behind the pickup widened rapidly.

  It wasn’t until they reached Boulder City that the vans caught up with them again. Boulder was virtually deserted, most of the residents having long since moved away, not wanting to live adjacent to a nuclear bomb site.

  “Government plate CDD7605,” Sam said out loud, reading the plates of the closest van.

  “Don’t let them get in front of you,” Tyler warned. “They’re trained to do that.”

  The vans tried several times, on the left or the right, sometimes both sides simultaneously, but Dodge countered them with violent swings of the big pickup.

  “I got a signal,” Sam cried out, just out of Boulder. It was weak, but it was there.

  They were climbing now. Hilly peaks to the right and scrubland to the left as they closed in on Lake Mead and the historic Hoover Dam.

  A sharp burst of gunfire came from behind them as they straightened out after a sweeping right-hand curve, and there was a series of thuds from the truck’s bed.

  “I think they’re running out of ideas,” Dodge said, swinging the truck around corner after corner.

  “They’ve changed their minds,” Tyler said.

  “Changed their minds about what?” Sam asked.

  “Taking us alive,” Tyler replied.

  “Give me the gun,” Vienna said in a voice that was little more than a rasp.

  “Are you okay to—” Tyler started.

  “Just give me the gun.”

  She wound down her window and aimed the pistol backward, letting off two quick shots, coughing weakly as she did so.

  “How’s that site coming?” Dodge asked.

  “Almost in,” Sam said.

  It was a Virtual Private Network, and he had to crack the PPTP to gain a foothold.

  One of the vans hurled itself up on the right, and Dodge slammed the pickup over into it with a juddering crash that threw Sam’s hands from the keyboard. The van stuck there for a moment as if glued to the side of the pickup, then dropped back as Dodge twisted the wheel around farther, forcing them off the road.

  The other van was making a run on the left-hand side, inching its way in front of them to block their path. Dodge wrenched at the wheel, and the tires of the pickup screamed as they veered onto an off-ramp to Hoover Dam.

  “You can’t get across the dam anymore,” Tyler yelled. “They closed it to traffic when they opened the bypass!”

  “Got nowhere else to go,” Dodge yelled back.

  “There’s a vulnerable TCP port in the NetBIOS,” Sam said, poking around the LoJack server. “The session services in the message block.”

  Another hammering burst of fire sounded behind them, and the rear window starred and cracked. Vienna fired twice again, the gunshots crashing like thunder inside the cab of the truck.

  “Can you discover the Windows shares?” Dodge asked through gritted teeth.

  “Already got them,” Sam said. “Trying to wriggle into the RPC.”

  “Here they come again—get down!” Tyler yelled as the vans took advantage of a passing area to attack from both sides, raking the pickup with automatic fire as they accelerated alongside.

  Dodge forced the left van toward the rocky wall, ignoring the firing from the right until the left van fell back; then he swung the pickup violently over to the right.

  The right-hand van slammed on its brakes to avoid being shunted off the side of a cliff, and fell back in behind the pickup with a squeal of protest from its tires.

  “Hang on!” Dodge shouted.

  Sam looked up to see concrete crash barriers in a line across the road in front of them. He braced himself against the front seat and hugged the precious laptop to his body.

  The bull-bar of the pickup truck smashed into the barrier at the narrow gap between two of the units. Concrete exploded past both sides of the truck, and Sam’s seat belt slammed into his chest, the laptop almost flying out of his arms. But the concrete barriers gave way, bunted to each side to make a gap for the flying pickup truck. Then they were through and on the old road across the top of the dam.

  “Okay, I’m in,” Sam cried. “What’s that plate again?”

  “CDD7605,” Vienna rasped over the sound of gunfire close behind.

  Sam keyed it in and poised the cursor above the Remote Shutdown button.

  “Hold it,” Dodge said. “I’ll tell you when.”

  Through the left window, Sam could see water. To the right, the vast concrete structure fell away from them into a deep canyon. Stretching between the walls of the canyon, impossibly high, was the massive arch of the bypass road, pencil-thin concrete towers supporting a narrow ribbon of bridge.

  Another concrete barrier came and went with the same shattering explosion of concrete chips and dust. Then they were across and careening around a tight curve beneath a rocky cliff face. Sam’s eye was caught by a massive drainpipe, surely a hundred yards high, that disappeared into the rock face to the right. Another tire-screeching corner and they were rising up a gently curving road toward a hairpin bend.

  “There,” Dodge said. “Right on the bend.” He gunned the engine toward the corner.

  Sam looked back and saw a dark shape leaning out the window of t
he nearest van, readying another shot.

  “Shake her around a bit,” he yelled, and Dodge jerked the steering wheel back and forth, spoiling the man’s aim. The driver’s-side mirror cracked and starred, but the rest of the volley went wild.

  Then they were on the curve, the pickup lifting and tilting as Dodge forced it around at high speed.

  For a moment, Sam thought they were going to roll, but the huge tires of the pickup steadied and straightened out of the curve.

  “Now!” Dodge yelled.

  Sam hit the button on the laptop just as the first van entered the apex of the curve. For a half second, he thought nothing would happen; then the nose of the van, which had been riding high, suddenly dropped as the engine lost power.

  On a steep rise, on a hairpin bend, it had almost the same effect as slamming on the brakes of the van, and there was a screech and a thud from behind it as the following van swerved hard to the left to the outside of the bend, clipping the rear of the lead van and spinning it around 180 degrees. It slid over toward the side of the road, hit the safety railing with a crunch, and stayed there.

  The trailing van was not so lucky. It rose onto two wheels with the impact of the collision and continued to veer left, crunching into and rolling over a thick stone wall and disappearing from sight.

  On the other side of that wall, a steep slope led straight down to the lake, and Sam didn’t need to hear the splash to know that that van would not be following them again.

  Vienna whooped with excitement, then convulsed as a spasm of coughing racked her body.

  Overhead, a cloud burst with a flash and a distant roar of thunder, and it began to rain.

  51 | REFUGEES

  Route 93 was deserted all the way to Kingman, Arizona.

  The thunderstorm still raged around them. As they drove, the sky lit up in brilliant, searing flashes of lightning. Stunted desert grass and rocks lined both sides of the highway, distorted into grotesque shapes as rain cascaded freely down the windshield.

  The radio in the pickup had been set to scan, and as they neared Kingman, it burst into life, picking up a music station. In between songs, the announcer, a woman with a soft, sultry voice, talked about community events and read some advertisements. There was a big yard sale at the First Baptist Church, apparently, and Joe’s Budget Flooring was having a half-price weekend. If there really was a war raging in America, either she didn’t know about it or it was already over.

  Sam scanned the skies for signs of aircraft, despite the weather. Ursula would not want to lose them now; that was for certain.

  Once, he thought he saw lights in the sky, and Dodge immediately cut the headlights and the engine.

  If it was an aircraft, it quickly disappeared into the thunderheads, and after only a short wait, Dodge restarted the truck.

  In those few minutes, the temperature inside the cab dropped at least ten degrees, and Sam was grateful once the heater kicked in again.

  “If they get us in this weather,” Dodge said, “it’ll be on thermal. A black truck at night in a storm will be nearly invisible, but we’ll be a lot warmer than the surrounding countryside. If they can get a thermal imager in our vicinity, we’ll show up as a hot spot.”

  Vienna’s condition seemed to be getting worse, not better. Her breathing at times became shallow and forced, and her face looked gray and lifeless. She spoke only twice on the trip. Once to ask for water and once to ask where they were. Other than that, she sat with her eyes closed, dozing or just resting, Sam wasn’t sure.

  A solitary streetlight illuminated a gas station, dark and silent, standing alone in the storm.

  “Pull in here,” Sam said, and Dodge turned into the forecourt, not bothering to signal.

  Why had he even thought that? Sam wondered. With all that was going on, signaling a turn hardly mattered. It wasn’t as if there were other cars on the road. But somehow it just seemed wrong. As if by getting the little things right, like signaling when you made a turn, you could start to put the big things right. Like Ursula.

  It made no sense, but what did make sense nowadays?

  Dodge stopped the truck when they got to the gas station. It looked deserted.

  “Everybody out,” Sam said. “We need to get Vienna out of her hazmat suit and see if we can find a hose to wash out the car.”

  “It’s freezing outside,” Tyler said, but opened his door anyway. The cold hit them immediately, and the rain lashed and stung at them.

  Sam helped Vienna out of the car, gasping as the shock of the rain hit his unprotected skin. His clothes were saturated in seconds. She stood silently, scarcely noticing the rain as he unfastened the suit and peeled it from her body.

  With tender fingers, he tilted her head backward. She shut her eyes against the rain. He ran his fingers through her hair, rinsing any dust from it, then helped her back into the pickup, soaking and shivering. Dodge had already found a hose and sprayed water across the backseat of the pickup, flushing out any dust residue.

  “Where’s Tyler?” Sam asked.

  Dodge shook his head.

  Tyler appeared a moment later, carrying a cardboard box full of food and drinks that he had appropriated from the gas station.

  Sam helped himself to a chocolate bar and realized that he hadn’t eaten for hours. Vienna refused to eat, though, which worried him.

  Dodge turned the heater to max as they swung around back onto the highway, and the air inside the car turned into a muggy soup within a few miles. Sam could actually see the steam lifting off his clothes as they slowly dried.

  The questions in his mind about the events in the world since they’d been holed up in Vegas were answered, shockingly and severely, as they turned onto the interstate at Kingman. Both lanes were lined with vehicles, many of them with roof racks full of luggage, strapped under sheets of plastic or tarpaulins.

  “What’s going on?” Sam wondered out loud.

  “Refugees,” Dodge said, and Sam realized that he was right.

  He had seen images like this many times before on news reports of wars or natural disasters in foreign countries. But never with his own eyes.

  Never in America.

  “What have we done?” Vienna whispered beside him. “What are they running from?”

  Sam shook his head but said nothing.

  It was after 10:00 p.m. by the time they reached Flagstaff, Arizona, crawling along with the rest of the refugees in lanes that were clogged and occasionally blocked.

  It took just one car to break down, and the entire lane would stop while its occupants, sometimes with the help of those behind, would get it onto the shoulder.

  There were still no airplanes, and the only reason that Sam could think of was the thunderstorm that raged above them. Mother Nature was protecting them from Ursula.

  Almost all of the refugee traffic was exiting at Flagstaff. Looking for a place to stop for the night, Sam thought. After a short discussion, they also took the exit, staying with the crowd in the hope that it might make it harder for Ursula to find them.

  Whether it was some herd instinct or it had been prearranged, the long lines of refugees all seemed to know where to go, and when they finally stopped, Sam could see why.

  A huge, almost tentlike dome rose up behind a line of pines to their right, and as they followed the car in front of them into a large parking lot, signs on both sides announced the J. Lawrence Walkup Skydome stadium.

  A sports stadium. Covered. With room for hundreds, if not thousands, of people. There would be toilets, and they could find a place to sleep. It was a logical place to head in a disaster.

  The parking lot seemed full. How many lives had they disrupted? Sam wondered, and not for the first time asked himself if they should have just left Ursula alone.

  But she was the one who had started this fight, and now they would have to finish it.

  They parked next to a white Mazda station wagon. A woman was getting two young children out of the car with the help of another lad
y, possibly her mother. The women looked harried and tired. The children looked as though they had just woken up, and the younger one, a boy, was crying.

  Vienna seemed tired and listless, and Sam had to help her out of the car, supporting her as they hurried through the driving rain to the stadium. Dodge followed them, carrying the cardboard box full of food and water, and Tyler trotted silently behind.

  “Wait a minute,” Sam said as they neared the entrance. “We need to check for security cameras.”

  “I think the power is out in the stadium,” Dodge said, gesturing at the entrance. “We should be okay.”

  The entrance to the stadium was in darkness, except for a flashlight that someone had set on top of a ticketing booth, shining a meager light down a long, dark corridor.

  If the power was off, then the cameras were off, Sam thought, and hoped it was true.

  Inside the stadium, it was warmer than he expected. His first thought was that the heaters were turned on, but as they made their way out through the players’ tunnel underneath the bleachers, he saw the real reason.

  Dotted across the artificial turf of the stadium were campfires, many ringed with small rocks, as if this was a camping ground instead of a refugee center.

  There must have been thirty or forty fires, each surrounded by people, huddling together for warmth or cooking in metal pots that were suspended over the flames by all sorts of ingenious stands or tripods. There was something about adversity, Sam thought, that brought out the ability of people to cope. To adapt. To survive, no matter what happened.

  Rain crashed and hammered on the roof of the stadium high above them, an intricate design of interlocking wooden triangles. The whole roof seemed to shudder with the explosions of thunder outside.

  “We should change cars again,” Sam said as they found an empty area and sat down on the turf. “Ursula knows what this one looks like, and we can’t expect this storm to last all the way to Cheyenne.”

  “I’ll go and see what I can find,” Dodge said.

  “I’ll come with you,” Tyler said.